Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

I have no recollection of arriving in Bulungu. I’m told I was carried on a pallet by some men who met us coming out of the jungle from a camp where they made charcoal during the dry season. I owe them my life, and regret that I can’t recall a face or voice or even the rhythm of their step as they carried me. I worry that I might have been indecent to them, yelling insults as Ruth May sometimes did when she was delirious with malaria fever. I suppose I’ll never know.

Bulungu was a whirl of excitement, which I took in gradually, thinking it must be due to our arrival. That we were an unlikely cause for celebration didn’t occur to me, since I was surrounded by so many other entirely improbable things: men beating drums and dancing with the crowns of palm trees sprouting out of their heads, for example. Women with iridescent feathers on their heads and trailing down their spines. Eeben Axelroot’s airplane with coronas of flame dancing around the wings as it touched down on a field of waving pink grass. Later on, in the dark shelter of someone’s house where we were staying, I watched the man Axelroot bizarrely transformed. The Underwood devil’s horns glowed through his slicked-down hair, as he sat in front of the window facing my mother. A living tail crept like a secretive velvet snake through the rungs of the chair behind him. I couldn’t take my eyes off that sinister restlessness. He held the tail in his left hand, trying to quiet it down as he talked. Discussing Rachel. Mother’s profile in the window turned to salt crystal, reflecting all light.

Other people came and went through the darkness where I lay under thatch, sheltered in my cave of dreams and rain. Sometimes I recognized Grandfather Wharton by my bed, patiently waiting for me to take my turn. With a guilty shock I saw we were playing checkers and I wasn’t holding up my end. Grandfather told me in the most offhand manner that we’d both died.

My father came only once, with blue flames curling from his eyebrows and tongue: Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. The thin blue line of words rose straight up from his lips through the air. I watched, entranced. At the point where they touched the thatched ceiling, they became a line of ants. Morning and dusk and morning again I watched them trailing up to a hole in the peak of the roof, carrying their tiny burdens out into the light.

Nothing here has surprised me. Least of all, the presence of Anatole Ngemba. One morning he was here, and every day after that, holding a burning tin cup of bitter tea to my mouth and repeating my name: “Beene-beene.” The truest truth. For my whole sixteen years I’ve rarely thought I was worth much more than a distracted grumble from God. But now in my shelter of all things impossible, I drift in a warm bath of forgiveness, and it seems pointless to resist. I have no energy for improving myself. If Anatole can wrap all my rattlebone sins in a blanket and call me goodness itself, why then I’ll just believe him.

That is all I can offer by way of explaining our surprising courtship. As I wake up out of my months-long sleep, I find the course of my life has narrowed right down, and I feel myself rushing along it like a flood of rich, red mud. I believe I’m very happy.

I can’t say how many weeks we were here before Mother left, or how many have passed since. I’ve had the good fortune of shelter; this hut belongs to a pupil of Anatole’s, whose father lived here but is now deceased. Anatole left Kilanga soon after we did, and now spends a lot of time in neighboring villages, talking to people and organizing something large. He seems to have countless friends and resources in Bulungu, and I can stay here as long as I need to. But Mother couldn’t. Mother could hardly sit still.

The day she left stands out in my mind as a drenched, sunny morning. The rain was letting up, and Anatole thought I was well enough to leave my mosquito tent for a few hours. We would go as far as the Kwenge to say good-bye. Rachel had already flown away with her devil saviour, and I was nailed down in Bulungu, since my body was still sunk so deep in poison it couldn’t bear up to many more mosquito bites. But Mother and Adah were leaving. A commerfant had arrived by truck from Leopoldville, and in the rainy season that was a miracle not to be snubbed. He intended to return to the city with a cargo of bananas, and shook his stick fiercely at the Congolese women who tried to clamber onto his massively loaded truck for a ride. But perhaps, the commerfant decided, looking Mother up and down, avoiding her rigid blue gaze, perhaps he had room for the white woman. In the great green mountain of bananas he fixed a nest just big enough for Mother and one of her children. I thought Adah’s lameness and Mother’s desperation had purchased his sympathy. I didn’t know until later there were rumors of huge rewards for white women delivered safely to the embassy in Leopoldville.

The truck was orange. I do remember that. Anatole and I rode along as far as the river to see them off. I vaguely heard Anatole making promises to Mother on my behalf: he would get me well, he’d send me when I felt ready to go home. It seemed he was speaking of someone else, as surely as the man with horns had flown away with someone other than Rachel. As we all bobbed precariously on the mountain of bananas, I just stared at Mother and Adah, trying to memorize what remained of my family.

As soon as we arrived at the mucky bank of the Kwenge, we spotted a problem. The old flatbed ferryboat had been functional just the day before, the commerfant claimed, but now it bobbed listlessly on the opposite shore in spite of his piercing -whistles and waving arms. Two fishermen turned up in a dugout canoe and informed us the ferry was stranded with no power. This was normal, it seemed. Not insurmountable at any rate. Up came our truck’s hood and out came the battery, which the fishermen would carry across the Kwenge to the ferry-for a price, of course. The commerfant paid it, muttering curses that seemed too strong for the early hour, since this was surely only the first irritation of a very long trip. (Or the third, if you counted my mother and Adah as the first two.) It was explained to us that the ferryman would jerry-rig the battery to start his ferry’s engine and come back across to us. Then we could push the truck onto the ferry and reunite it with its battery again on the other side.

Right away, though, another problem. The immense truck battery was of an ancient type too large to be wedged down in the belly of the tiny canoe. After great discussion the fishermen found an answer: a pair of broad planks were set across the boat in a peculiar configuration that required the battery to ride on one side, with a counterweight on the other. There being no large rocks at hand, the fishermen eyed Adah and me. They decided either one of us would work for ballast, but feared Adah’s handicap would prevent her holding on, and if she fell in the river the precious battery would also be lost. Mother, looking straight ahead, agreed I was the stronger one. No one mentioned I was dizzy with malaria fever, nor did it occur to me to raise this as an excuse. Anatole held his tongue, in deference to my family. We’d lost so much already, who was he to tell us how to risk what was left?

I went in that canoe. I could tell the river was receding from its rainy-season flood by its peculiar rank smell and all the driftwood stranded along its banks. I marveled that I’d learned so much about Congolese rivers. I thought of my mother’s lifelong warning to us children whenever we entered a boat: if it overturns, grab hold for dear life! Yet Congolese pirogues are made of such dense wood if they capsize they sink like a rock. All these thoughts passed through me while the fishermen paddled urgently across the swift, boiling Kwenge. I clung to the rough plank, poised far out over the water, giving all my might to the service of balance. I don’t remember letting out my breath until we were safely across.